uni'alumni 2012_ENG

The team at the Office for Teaching and Learning of the University of Freiburg gives teachers tips on improving their teaching skills – whether in seminars, lecture courses, or workshops. Rimma Gerenstein asked the ­director of the office what constitutes good teaching. uni’alumni: Ms. Weiß, what kinds of con- cerns do teachers usually come to you with? Silke Weiß: The main goal of teachers is to opti- mize their courses, improve their own teaching skills, and thus provide better learning support for their students. At a large university, however, the concrete concerns of teachers can be quite diverse. They range from putting together a syllabus, pre- paring a lesson plan, integrating research into teaching, and encouraging active participation by using a variety of teaching methods to advising stu- dents and developing new forms of examinations. Providing Guidance on the Path from Novice to Expert Silke Weiß Advises Teachers to Take On the Perspective of Their Students INTERVIEW Silke Weiß is director of the Office for Teaching and Learning of the University of Freiburg Since she studied humanities herself, Kolle- frath-Persch often has to turn to reference works when writing articles on complex developments in medicine or microsystems engineering. But she views this as an advantage: “It’s often the people who aren’t from the field who ask the right ques- tions – namely about relationships and the larger context. That makes the text easy to understand and interesting for readers.” The portal makes use of the many channels and formats enabled by Web 2.0. Articles are often flanked by videos or other media, for instance, and researchers keep readers up to date on developments in ongoing projects in a blog. Science Slam: Research in Ten Minutes The bartender shoves freshly tapped beers over the bar amid snippets of loud conversation and laughter. The lights go on, the public claps, hoots, and whistles. Four men step onto the stage. They will be performing this evening at the MensaBar on Rempartstraße. Stand-up comedy? No. Music? No. What then? Science. The first German science slam was held at the Darmstadt University of Technology in 2006. The idea soon spread to Berlin, Göttingen, and Braun- schweig, and since 2010 it has also become popular in Freiburg. The format is based on the poetry slam, in which young poets try to win over the audi- ence’s favor with entertaining rhymes and verses. In a science slam, on the other hand, each re- searcher has ten minutes to present his or her proj- ect – making it understandable for a general audi- ence and as entertaining as possible. At the end of the performance, the audience gives the partici- pants points and chooses the winner. “Linguistics is a remarkable discipline,” begins Dr. Martin Hilpert – whose short presentation on linguistic change will later be chosen as the winner amidst much applause. “It combines the dryness and technicality of the natural sciences with the ­inutility and pointlessness of the humanities.” While studying letters from England written over 500 years ago with a colleague, Hilpert noticed that there were many different ways of spelling the same verb. The linguists developed a mathemati- cal model that can predict what spelling an author will choose with 95 percent accuracy. Hilpert asks the question that’s probably on the tip of every- one’s lips himself: “So what’s the point of all this when there are actually more important problems in the world?” The linguist sees the science slam as a kind of reality check. It allows him to test whether scholars from other fields understand what he’s investi­ gating in the language lab – and to learn whether 6 Cover Story uni'alumni 2012